His Second War

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His Second War Page 23

by Alec Waugh


  It was a life that five years ago, he with his restlessness, with his need for change, would have believed intolerable for himself, but it was to prove more satisfactory than anything he had known since he had left his depot. One day was like another. Yet each day in some way managed to be different. And at the end of the day there was the agreeable exhaustion that follows a long day’s work; the knowledge, moreover, that he had not by any means always had during his previous two and a half years on the staff, that the work that had exhausted him was really of value to the war: a knowledge that had as its corollary a pride that he had not felt since he left Dorchester, in the composite work of the organization in which he served. There was the comradeship of men working together in harmony for a common cause.

  In his previous appointments he had invariably found himself when the first novelty wore off wondering how he could get transferred to some other place, to some other kind of work. For the first time for close upon three years he found himself settled down to the thing that he was doing. He had a sense now of finality: a belief that when he did leave here it would be to put off khaki altogether; that he had been posted to his last appointment.

  119

  In Beirut he had found one or two people whom he had known, although not intimately, before the war. Cairo had been full of old friends and acquaintances. But in Paiforce he was not in contact with a single person that he had known before September 1942. It was strange to find oneself at forty-four never able to say to anyone: “Do you remember the time when we …”

  120

  STOVES

  He presumed them to be a British invention since he had not seen even a modification of one in an Arab house.

  They were low, brick coffins, roofed with tin. There was a round hole, the size of a billiard ball, at the top. In front there was a narrow aperture the width of a man’s hand. From the back of the coffin an iron tube carried the fumes into the open air. Beside the hole on the top was a petrol tin filled with crude oil. Through a narrow tube the oil dripped through the hole. Inside the tin was a Heath Robinson contraption for regulating the flow. On the floor of the coffin a small saucer was set to catch the flow. Once lit, the oil was supposed so to heat the tin covering to the coffin that the room would be comfortably warm.

  It never was.

  Either the saucer spluttered like an inferior firework or it emitted a raging furnace that converted the room into an oven. It depended on the wind, on the temperature, on the extent to which the pipe and saucer had been cleaned. It was impossible to adjust the flow of oil; it stopped or poured. And when it poured it would seep through the brickwork and ooze in a thick black stream across the floor, as often as not to drip into the rooms below.

  There was one school of thought that considered that water should be mixed with the oil, and in some offices a second petrol tin was arranged, through which water dripped simultaneously with the oil into the saucer. The fire certainly under this treatment seemed more effective, but it produced its ultimate effect of heat through a series of small explosions that were not only noisily disturbing, but emitted a volume of malodorous smoke.

  The fireman, an Iraqi, when he had finished cleaning out the stoves each morning would rinse his hands at the tap and dry them in his hair.

  121

  CHRISTMAS DAY, 1942

  Since offices opened on Boxing Day, Christmas Eve rather than Christmas Day was the big evening in Bagdad. It was after two when he got back to the mess after a late gay party. But the cool morning air blew away his tiredness as he walked four hours later along the river to early service. It was still dark and the long curve of lights was reflected in the water. But it was against a sky of tattered scarlet that the date palms and low houses of Alwiyah stood out in silhouette. When he came out of church the sun was shining and the sky was blue, like a Monte Carlo Christmas.

  At the mess a stack of letters awaited him. He had been resolved this year to have a real Christmas mail. On the seventh of December he had signed with himself a self-denying ordinance. “From now on until Christmas I will not open a single envelope,” he had said.

  With excitement, impatience, curiosity, he had watched the stack pile up. It was not a big pile, but it was a pile.

  The majority of the envelopes were small and brown. He was glad of it. He had come now, after being fifteen months away, to prefer an airgraph to a letter. An airgraph was more exciting. It had mystery. With the address printed out in capitals you could not recognize the handwriting, you did not know whom it was from till you had opened it. It was always with a sense of excited anticipation that he tore the flap.

  The airgraph had a completeness too that no letter had. In that confined space there was no room for an unnecessary word, a person had to think before he wrote: to decide exactly what he wanted to say, exactly what he was to say. He had to confine himself to the essentials. From an airgraph you could really guess at what was upon a person’s mind. You had the feeling, too, that more would have been written had there been more space. You did not feel, as so often you were forced to feel with “a real letter,” that your correspondent had been hard put to it to turn to the fourth sheet.

  More than once during 1942 a “real letter” had made him feel rather more than lonely. A picture had risen before his eyes of a very busy person who worked hard and had not much time for play—as people had not in England then—putting off “her letters” from week to week, then finally setting a day apart: spreading out her correspondence on the floor, making a regular business of it, then at the end of three hours or so rising from a pile of letters with a sigh of shrugged relief and a “that’s settled that for quite a while.”

  When he had read a letter written, as he suspected, in that spirit, he had had the melancholy sensation of having been put away into cold storage for three months.

  He was relieved when he saw on Christmas morning that there was no envelope in the handwriting that had welcomed his arrival in the Middle East. He could not have borne a duty letter on Christmas Day.

  There was an airgraph, though: a casual, not an “occasion” airgraph. She had met that morning a mutual friend, they had talked of him and in the talking she had missed him and had hastily scrawled an airgraph on the way back from lunch to tell him so. Its very casualness brought her close. If only, he thought, if only …

  Pensively he stared at the small piece of celluloid that had taken five weeks to come here. That this should be the quickest means of correspondence! It made London seem very far. More than water lay between him and London. You could not judge distance any more by miles or months. Separations were gauged now by a different measure. If only, he thought, if only …

  Yes, but if he were in London now. Who knew but that that half-achieved reconciliation made in a last-time atmosphere might not by now have led back on its own old traces, to a recreating of the mood that had decreed that summer-long estrangement, leading by those same tracks to a resumption this time complete and final of that first division.

  Perhaps if he were in London now it would be only to find himself once again avoiding the places she frequented, the persons that she knew. Perhaps he was very lucky. Perhaps he was nearer to her here.

  122

  EXTRACT FROM A LETTER TO HIS FATHER, 1 JANUARY 1943

  “… I have celebrated the New Year by buying a pleasant Persian picture for my office”.

  123

  AN ARAB PARTY, 16 JANUARY 1943

  The Sindbad Hotel was crowded. Every hat-peg in the passage leading from the door to the dining-room was crowned. Coats were flung over the hall table and on the chairs in the manager’s private office. The bar was lined three deep. There was not a chair empty in the lounge. The waiters hurrying from the kitchen with tureens of soup and dishes of hors d’æuvres had to wriggle between gossiping groups. The congestion on this particular evening was not due to Iraq’s declaration of war that afternoon but to the management’s announcement that stuffed sucking pig would be served for dinner at a co
st of 500 fils.

  There was indeed no sign anywhere that that day Iraq had declared war upon the Axis. There was no display of flags, there were no crowds in the streets, no processions, no martial music. At the party to which he went that evening the incident was not even mentioned.

  The party was being given by a local merchant in his private house, his own previous presence in the Sindbad being due to the mistaken idea that the Sindbad would be a quiet place to collect before going on. The party had no particular raison d’être. It was not to celebrate anything or to negotiate anything. It was just that that particular merchant was in an expansive mood. Nor was there any great display about the party, lavish though in fact it was. The merchant’s house was in a side street, a ground-floor flat of a three-storied building. In Arab-fashion, arm-chairs and settees were set along the wall. Carpets provided the main decorative feature, chairs and settees were draped with them. Two very large Persian carpets were on the floor. On each wall there was a carpet. The carpets were treated as wallpaper and enlarged family photographs were hung on them.

  In the centre of the room there was an open charcoal fire in a silver brazier. By each settee was an occasional table. There was a dish of nuts on every table. By the door was a table set with bottles. A bottle of whisky cost at that time three dinars in the bazaar. The guests arrived at nine and left at half-past two. But there was no point during the evening when a white-coated butler was not serving drinks.

  There were four British officers there, some eight or nine Iraqis, and three dancing-girls from the Alf Leila Cabaret. There was a four-man band—a violinist, the leader who played a fife, a native drummer, and a harpist. Most of the time the band played from the hall; sometimes it came into the drawing-room. The hall, which was long and narrow, was crowded with the children of the host and with family relations. At the end of the room was a glass window. When the girls danced, the children pressed their faces against it.

  The girls dressed differently, but they all danced the same oriental measure. They cracked their fingers above their heads, they undulated and rotated swinging their skirts wide and high, checking their stride with a sudden jerk into rigidity, a jerk that seemed both a forward and backward movement. They would bend backwards from the waist, looking backwards and upwards into their host’s eyes. It was the privilege of the host and the host’s family to slip dinar notes into the top of the dancer’s dress or between her teeth—notes that as she danced she would toss to the leader of the band. It was the privilege of the guests to be entertained. The dancing-girls sat beside them and held their hands. One of them wore a gold cross about her neck. If one knelt at her feet one was allowed to kiss the cross.

  At half-past eleven supper was served. A broad, long buffet table was laden with enough food for a hundred persons. There was hot kebbab. There were round cakes of kubbah. There were salads and cold meats and chicken; there was a whole pig on a bed of rice; a great cone of oranges; a plate of sticky sweetmeats.

  At the end of the evening the host’s car was waiting for his British guests.

  124

  “SECOND WIND”

  There is a moment that comes to everyone in the Middle East when he realizes that he is there for “keeps”: that he is there till the war is over.

  Through one’s first weeks and months one lives still in terms of England, of one’s friends and plans and interests there. One thinks of oneself as being away from them on a visit. At the back of one’s mind there is the feeling that one has only to say when the right time comes: “Well, I think it’s time that I was getting back and seeing how things are going there.”

  It is slowly—though in the end the recognition of it may come in a sudden flash—that one comes to see that one is not here on that kind of contract, that one cannot say: “This year, next year, the year after.” That one cannot mark dates upon a calendar.

  It is with a shock that one learns that; and it is through a black period that one passes while one is adjusting oneself to the discovery, to the realization of all that the discovery involves, to the realization that the world to which eventually one will return, will not be the world one left, that the friends to whom one will return will be different people, set in and conditioned in an environment of altered circumstance: that one can live no longer in terms of England and one’s friends.

  There is a bad black period while one faces that. Then one starts again.

  One goes on talking about victory in 1944, one comments in one’s letters home on the prophecies of politicians. “I hope and pray heaven,” one says, “that this will be the last Christmas that we spend apart.” But the phrases and comments are automatic.

  One knows that one day victory will come, as one knows that one day one will be old, that one day one will die. But it is not in human nature to live in terms of such vague assignments. A human being forgets the nature of his “indefinite reprieve.” The soldier in the Middle East makes short-term plannings for the “day after to-morrow” and “next week.”

  He has got his second wind.

  125

  “THE WAGON”

  Though he considered himself a “moderate drinker” he had always believed that wine preferably, but alcohol in some form certainly, was at his age essential to his existence. He had considered it the petrol on which his particular mechanism worked. He had not believed that it was possible for him to enjoy himself without it. It was with some alarm therefore that he faced the prospect of exiling himself on to the “wagon.”

  It was an economic issue, solely. There were not in Bagdad the facilities for cashing cheques on London that there had been in Beirut and Cairo. The cost of every single commodity, taxicabs in particular, was three times as high. He had, when he had paid his mess bill, a surplus of a bare three pounds a week for personal expenses; expenses that included repairs and additions to his wardrobe. He could have managed very well, of course, if he had taken all his meals in mess. He suspected, though, that if he did not throw an occasional party in the town he would soon go off his head. He therefore went on the “wagon” except on the occasions when he had a guest to dinner.

  It was a relief to find that, after the first three days, he could manage very well without his apéritif before lunch and couple of whiskies before dinner. It gave him a sense of freedom. But it did slightly annoy him to be forced to recognize that as a result of his temperance he now found himself in such irrepressibly good health that he was able to enjoy a number of things that before would have bored him utterly. He hated the idea that perhaps after all the prohibitionists were right.

  126

  A NOVELIST IN KHAKI

  In peace-time, at work upon a manuscript, he had often wondered who would eventually read what he was writing. He knew how many copies of his books were sold, he knew the circulation of the magazines for which he wrote. But he had no idea as to the kind of people who asked for his books in libraries, who on opening a magazine turned first to his story in it. He had no idea what his public was.

  As an Intelligence Officer producing situation summaries and appreciations all such doubts were resolved for him. He knew to a reader what his public was. At the end of each summary was set out a list of names showing the distribution.

  He produced on the average one such summary a week. “You might as well keep your hand in,” his G.2 told him. But the conditions under which he wrote could scarcely have been more different from those to which in peace-time he was accustomed.

  Though it was over twenty-five years since he had seen his first novel on the bookstalls it still gave him a thrill to see his name at the head of a story or on the cover of a book. His work now went out under his G.2’s signature.

  In peace-time he was very particular about the type and format of his books and had once refused a lucrative offer from a publisher because he had not liked the way in which that particular house “got up” its books. His writing was now muddily cyclo-styled on porous paper. The most that he could hope of its appearance was
legibility.

  As a novelist his first aim had been a smooth flow of narrative, sentence leading to sentence, paragraph to paragraph. His writing was now paragraphed and sub-paragraphed in lettered and numbered sections so that the whole thing read like a series of synopses. It was impossible moreover to write a harmonious sentence when every name had to be followed by the bracketed figures of back references.

  In the criticism of his work there was no question here of style or of entertainment value. A summary was subject to two tests—was the meaning absolutely clear and could each statement be backed by the proof of facts.

  He enjoyed as a literary exercise the composition of these summaries. Their insistence upon clarity was a salutary discipline, and one could see the strength and weakness of an argument when one set out its separate clauses in lettered and numbered paragraphs. He had moreover a freedom to speak his mind without qualification that he had as a writer rarely been able to enjoy. The novelist is an entertainer who has to present his hard facts tactfully. As an Intelligence Officer he was writing for men who wanted the unvarnished truth. His terms of reference were definite. “Discover the facts, tabulate them clearly, suggest what inferences may be drawn from them.”

 

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